


Courting Death

by HenryMercury



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Murder, Sass, questionable sanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-29 00:08:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6351001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Who the hell are you?”</p><p>The strange woman chuckled, a smooth, dark sound that made Alpha wonder what her singing voice would be like.</p><p>“Darling, I’m your life’s work.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Courting Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seeminglyineffable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seeminglyineffable/gifts).



> Old, based on even older conversations with ^

Alpha pulls the trigger and watches as, a split second later, the Ambassador topples limply from his position on the podium. The kill itself is quiet, eerily close to peacefulness, like the moment for which a breath is held before a scream.

Then the crowd erupts. She doesn’t stay to watch the rest of the scene; they’ll be replaying it on the TV later anyway. And maybe this time if she escapes quickly enough _She_ won’t have time to catch up to her and complicate things.

“Seriously?”

Damn, too late.

“Seriously, Allie, when God gave me this gig he told me one all-important thing: _Don’t burn out_ , he said. _Don’t do it all in six days because you’ll end up doing a crap job and you’ll be mopping up that mess for the rest of eternity. Pace yourself, D_ , he said. He failed to mention at the time that he’d put _you_ down here just to make my life difficult. Thanks, Big Man,” the figure, cloaked in a black flowing dress, sends a disdainful look up at the sky for that last part. She leans heavily on one hip and cocks a dark eyebrow at Alpha. Death’s form varies somewhat each time she appears, but she’s always strangely seductive.

“Nice face,” Alpha says, intending flippancy, as she continues walking. Death follows along beside her, the swift strides not seeming to tax her anywhere near as much as they do Alpha, especially when she has a rifle to carry. Supernatural bitch.

“I _know_ ,” Death agrees. “I am definitely a fan of these lips. And this colour suits me, don’t you think?”

Alpha glances over for a better look at Death’s latest body before she can help herself. The look in the woman’s eyes is the same as it always is—a collection of things that shouldn’t work together but do; the suggestion of her true age and power flickers there, immeasurable. In her pupils there is darkness that goes beyond the mere absence of light and begins to consume, like a black hole. There is brightness too, though; wicked cheer, like an electrocution. There is _life_ , and more of it that Alpha feels most of the time. It’s never comfortable to realise that you feel deader inside than Death herself.

The face, though—it really is nice. Death’s skin is darker than it was last time, now a sandy brown. Her lips are painted with red, but the shade looks more like the skin of a sweet apple than blood or anything so macabre. She hasn’t changed the shape of her face, at least; she’s perfected her jawline, apparently, opting to stick with the same soft curve for the past several appearances. Alpha’s not sure how long Death has been appearing to people here on earth, but if she hasn’t figured out what she wants to look like by now, Alpha wonders whether she ever will.

“I don’t mean to be so fashion-driven,” Death chatters as they walk, “but I added a little bit of junk in the trunk this time, too. Booty seems to be all the rage in these parts right now—it’s so hard to keep up with human trends.”

Alpha doesn’t want to think about Death’s butt. The entire idea is too bizarre.

That’s not to say it isn’t a nice butt. Objectively speaking.

“You know, you change almost as often as I do.”

Mentally, Alpha balks at that. She doesn’t let it disrupt the steady pattern of her footsteps, though, doesn’t let her face broadcast it for even a split second.

“Platinum blonde this time, Allie. I preferred the burgundy, to be honest. Black was nice; brought out the grey-blue in your eyes—the grey-blue contacts, anyway. I swear I’ve never seen your natural hair colour. I wonder, do you even remember what it looks like? Do you even have one? Why get impatient with me for altering my appearance here and there? We’re both just trying to pretend we’re like everybody else in the crowd.”

 _'Silent as the grave' my ass_ , Alpha thinks as Death goes on and on.

“It’s not the same,” she murmurs. “This is my job.”

“And this is mine. We’re in the same business, darling. Practically colleagues.”

#

Alpha remembers the first time she met Death—she’d been at a fancy dinner party, ensuring that the dose of tetrodotoxin in the host’s fugu was higher than he and the chef intended. The kind of thrill-seeker who liked to eat his fish with a little of the poison left in, this man was the sort of job that made it so easy there was almost no point in her being there. They should have given the assignment to someone less experienced—but the saké was gorgeous, so Alpha had decided she could tamp down her complaints for the evening.

She’d made sure she wasn’t seen as she slipped into the kitchen and went about her work. She never miscalculated.

And yet—

“Hello there darling,” a woman, shoulders laden with black curls, leant up against the bench and startled her. Alpha didn’t _startle_ on missions. She was too precise. She tried quickly to obscure what she was doing, but the woman just waved her on, like it was nothing.

“Don’t stop on my account. In fact, I’m rather relying on you, here. It’s how I got my invitation. Nice party. Great saké. Even better shōchū. Very potent. Damaging at least two livers irreparably as we speak.”

Alpha didn’t recognise the woman, and she’d memorised the guest list.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Call me D,” the woman answered with a wink.

D disappeared from the kitchen and Alpha didn’t see her again, save for a fleeting flash of black ringlets as the host’s speech became incoherent and the guests panicked.

Alpha didn’t put two and two together until the second time they met. She wasn’t slow on the uptake by any means, but she’d also never been the type for any brand of superstition. Death undoubtedly existed, but it was a procedure, an experience, a state of being. As an expert in administering it, she’d presumed herself intimately acquainted.

So she’d been somewhat mistaken about that.

#

The second time, she was in an alley behind a cheap diner, the nearest streetlight just too far to lift the darkness that concealed her, trash and mucky puddles underfoot. She wiped the gang leader’s blood off her favourite knife before returning it to its place at her thigh. Vladlena had put up more of a fight than she’d anticipated. This mission was never meant to be a challenge, but it was personal, and she had to clean up her own messes. She and Vlad had certainly never been friends, but the Russian had been quite a lay back when they were both climbing the same set of ropes within the organisation. She had never excelled in quite the way Alpha had, though; Vlad was all about brute force and in the end her heavy brass-knuckled fists and bike jacket collar were equally useless against a surgically accurate blade to the carotid. Alpha was stepping around her pooling blood when someone called out from behind her— _behind_ her, in the dead end of the deserted lane.

“Nice aim.” The statement was accompanied by a slow clap.

In a flash Alpha’s knife was in her right hand again, her left reaching for her gun in case it became necessary.

“Hey, hey calm down,” the stranger, a woman with a bob of black ringlets, dressed in dark jeans and a dark hoodie, sighed as if put upon. “I’m hardly going to dob you in. It’s just I’ve seen that done at least a million times and nobody pulls it off quite as sexily as you.”

Alpha didn’t lower her knife. Blood still rushing from the fight with Vlad, she considered running, considered adding the stranger to the body count. In the end she opted for neither.

“Who the hell _are_ you?”

The strange woman chuckled, a smooth, dark sound that made Alpha wonder what her singing voice would be like.

“Darling, I’m your life’s work.”

#

At meeting number three, Alpha was perched in a building overlooking a bustling town square, much like the job she’s just completed now. She was warier, after the last encounter, starting to realise what she was dealing with; a genuine supernatural being, or a serious case of psychosis.

She pulled the trigger, the target went down, the crowd went wild—but somewhere in between, a dark-skinned woman with short black dreadlocks atop her head leant down over the target, an action so much less frenzied than the movements of those around her that despite the difference in appearance Alpha _knew_ , just from watching, that it was Her.

“Allie,” the same woman greeted her soon after—much too soon for her to have followed on foot.

“Death,” Alpha replied, and was met with no disagreement.

#

This, now, is the twelfth time Death has appeared to her, spoken to her. Alpha hasn’t been counting for any reason other than she catalogues everything, takes fastidious mental notes because failing to notice some crucial detail, slipping up even once, will be the end of her.

Her budding acquaintanceship with Death itself serves as a helpful reminder of that.

“Your kill count’s gone up lately,” Death is saying. She barely pauses for breath—does she need to breathe? Do things go wrong if she tries, the way they do when living things stop?

“So what?”

“So... three guys in two weeks? It’s like you’re trying to get my attention, darling.”

“Two guys and a girl,” Alpha corrects. It’s the weakest of denials. The truth is, she doesn’t know whether or not what Death’s suggesting is true. The woman irritates her endlessly when she’s around, but in her absence the time ticks away like a noisy clock, incessant and insufferable. Each moment is oversaturated with self-consciousness, refusing to fade into the background because she’s _waiting_. Alpha’s never worked with anyone else before, never been that intrigued by people. They have nothing she can’t take away from them.

“Mm, of course,” Death nods. Her voice is smugly sarcastic but it silences the ticking. “That Daniels girl was a gorgeous little thing. Inspiration for my new ears, as a matter of fact. She had these dainty earlobes—”

The _Daniels girl_ was Anna Beth Daniels, twenty-five, super-secretary and other woman to the senator that had been Alpha’s primary target. She had indeed been gorgeous. She’d rather smudged her makeup in those last few moments, but Alpha would never judge a person too harshly by the hour of their death. She very much doubts her own will be flattering.

“She was pregnant, you know,” Death informs her offhandedly.

“Are you trying to make me regret it?” Alpha shoots back, “because I haven’t made that mistake since day one on the job, and that was a decade ago.”

She’s not lying, not really, but still the thought unsettles her stomach. She hasn’t been sick on the job since she was sixteen and had to douse a man in gasoline while Vlad, her then-partner, video taped it for their employer. This employer had wanted the guy’s eyes in a snaplock bag, too, for some reason; a more physical souvenir than the recording. Vlad and her smallest knife had already done the honours there, while Alpha had done the filming. The camerawork had ended up a little unsteady.

“Oh, I know, darling, I was there. You were adorable at sixteen.”

Something in the way Death speaks about the incident makes Alpha feel like she has acid reflux. She swallows down the surprisingly visceral sensations as they rise in her throat. She has no patience for heartburn.

“I’m still adorable,” she snaps, voice sharp and cold.

A lesser being than Death would be fazed, but Alpha’s companion just reaches out and runs a hand down her cheek, soft and a little on the cold side.

“Yes you are,” she agrees. “You’re the most adorable thorn in my side, honestly. God’s lucky he made you so damn cute, or he’d be getting a far more colourful earful about the workload you’re putting on me.”

“I have a little knowledge of history under my belt,” Alpha snorts. “Enough to know you’ve handled worse.”

“Yes and no,” says Death. “In terms of quantity, then yes, of course I have. With ease. You’re not the only one here who’s a master at what she does, Allie. But you know what? None of the others ever spoke to me, not after they learned my name. I don’t know if that makes you nicer or twice as cold as the rest of them, but I like you either way, and you have to understand that it fucking _bothers_ me to admit that.”

Alpha nods, and tries to stop feeling the little slice of shivery contact replay itself over and over down the right side of her face. She knows she’s probably imagining it, but this kind of touch feels different when it’s not accompanied by a false name, an ulterior motive, egged on by a lie, numbed by the overriding focus of a mission in progress.

She thinks she’s got a pretty good idea of what Death means about being bothered.

#

The thirteenth scene that Death deigns to witness in her corporeal form is not one Alpha is proud of.

She must have had more bullets in her handgun than this, and she swears it through gritted teeth as her target, hardly an incompetent fighter himself, leaves what will no doubt prove to be dark bruises around her throat. Her vision swims with the target’s reddened face and greying hair above her as he curses her in Greek, his spittle spraying everywhere. Behind him floats the figure of Death. Death doesn’t intervene, can’t intervene, as she’s explained before. She’s just hanging around because someone here is definitely going to die today. Death is here to administer her final kiss.

Right now the jury’s out on whether the recipient of that kiss will be the target or Alpha herself.

Her image splitting into double, then a watery triple, Alpha can’t help but observe that Death is as ethereally beautiful as ever. Her hair is long again, longer even than it had been that first time at the party. It’s straight instead of curly, now, and tinged with red at the ends, as though she’s dipped it in blood.

Blood. Ah, that’s the taste in Alpha’s mouth right now.

“You should be more careful who you trust,” the target says. Or that’s what Alpha gleans; her Greek has never been perfect and it’s getting a little hard to hang on to the world around her. The sounds come easier than the sights, at least. Sounds are always the last to go.

There’s nothing she can say back with her windpipe crushed, so he continues his monologue. Awesome. She’s going to die listening to some dickhead talking about how he’s beaten her.

“Those friends of yours want you dead at least as much as I do, right now. You’re not reliable, they say; your head isn’t right for the job anymore. Seeing shit that isn’t there. Going crazy. Going soft. And I have to say I’m thrilled that I get to do the honours.”

In one last desperate kick of energy, Alpha’s flailing leg collides with the target’s crotch. He takes it admirably well, but it still throws him off just enough for her to pry his loosened hands from her neck and roll out from under him. Sharp, wheezing breaths claw at her lungs as she rights herself and reaches for her knife. She doesn’t bother with her second gun; the shortage of ammo in the first one is likely some kind of sabotage on the part of Abeer, the asshole who gave it to her just before the target walked in to the bar they’re now out the back of. Not leaving enough time for her to properly check the weapon over. The Greek was right; she shouldn’t have trusted that Abeer’s motivations were still in line with hers. She can trust people’s gun skills to be consistent, but not the directions in which they’re pointing their barrels.

She heaves a breath in and does her level best to maintain her balance despite the dizziness. The first knife she throws embeds itself in his shoulder, just beneath the clavicle. She throws a second—her favourite, small but nicely weighted—which lands in his neck. The target finally stumbles, falls, and she draws the second gun, whipping him as he goes down just to be sure. This kill is messy, and she aches, and she’s going to need ice and stitches and a fresh bottle of foundation to try and keep the obviousness of the damage to her face and neck at a minimum.

A fresh wave of dizziness washes over her and she kneels down heavily on the back steps of the bar, swallowing back blood and bile because leaving her signature right here on the concrete won’t do.

She _might_ have a concussion.

The shrill scream that sounds behind her is like a physical blow, as if someone is burying an ice hammer in the back of her skull. The gun is still in her hand as she looks up and sees the boy, probably eight or nine years old. She puts her finger on the trigger and points it at him. There’s no knowing whether it’s even loaded—another gift from fucking Abeer. She has to do something, though, and she wants this whole affair to be over. The boy has seen Alpha, and he’s seen the crumpled form of the Greek lying on the asphalt. There shouldn’t even be a question, here; she’s not paid to be merciful.

She lets the gun decide.

“Ever played Russian Roulette?” she asks, the words hoarse in a raw throat, slurred upon a bitten tongue.

The gun fires and the kid’s screaming stops not long after that.

Shoving her tools back into their places at her belt she starts ambling away as quickly as she can, but she doesn’t miss the image of Death bending down and caressing the child’s face slowly, pressing shiny apple-pink lips to his forehead and then to his mouth as she delivers the ending to which Alpha sentenced him.

She and Death don’t exchange a single word that day. Alpha doesn’t know what she’d have said if they’d tried.

She rots in her musty hotel room for the days that follow, lying low now that it seems she’s a tool bound for the scrap yard. She disposes of anything that might let any of her contacts trace her location, watches infomercials about gadgets that cut eggs a million different ways, and lives off oily room service and Doritos. She cleans her wounds regularly, sleeps with her eyes open and dreams about the way Death had kissed the little boy so softly, like an apology on Alpha’s behalf. She wakes in a cold sweat with a small list of questions she needs answers to: whose conscience has been transplanted into her, and how to go about returning it; what the boy’s name was; how to stop envying the little chapped lips that turned blue with the taste of apples and black holes whispering across them.

She tries to go back to sleep but she can’t, tries to throw up in the grimy toilet but retches uselessly until she gives up, unable to make her throat any sorer. She sits on the shower floor and the cold spray fails to numb her mind.

She tries to call Death, wondering whether a prayer sent in her name might reach her, but abruptly feels stupid. She picks a blade out of her disposable razor and holds it against her wrist, wondering whether _that_ would summon her—but she’s been trained in exactly where to slice to bleed a person dry, and in her gut she knows her hands lack that intent today.

For a feeling she’s denied knowing all these years, shame fits her too snugly, holds her too familiarly.

#

When she ventures out a week later, it’s because she needs a stiff drink and the minibar is empty. She puts on her little black dress, one of her many costumes, and heads to a bar a little way down the road.

She brings back the slimy man who greets her with a groping hand to the breast and tries to spike her drink not ten minutes later. She doesn’t let him kiss her, just leads him to the bed and smothers him with the lumpy hotel pillow.

“What a goddamn mess.”

Alpha’s heart lurches at the sound of Death’s drawl. The woman’s hair has the same red tips as the last time she saw her, glaring like an angry reminder of the blood that Alpha spilled that day, wrongly or otherwise. Her skin is paler than Alpha has ever seen it, so white it’s closer to a translucent blue. Her eyes are gray and the gaze that lands upon Alpha is missing its spark of celestial fire. Today Death looks old, tired, disappointed.

Alpha starts to sympathise, thinking she knows the feeling—but really there’s no way she can fathom the experiences of a being like Death. There’s a wall up between them, and she hates it. She feels like she’s still waiting, waiting, even with the woman standing here in front of her.

“I’m sorry,” Alpha says.

Death picks at her long black fingernails, affecting boredom.

“Whatever for?” she asks dryly.

It’s a good question. Alpha can pin down one or two things she’s specifically sorry for, but beyond that she just _aches_ with everything at once, the way she’ll feel fine before going to sleep but wake up sore and stiff after the strain has had time to sink into her muscles and joints.

“I just am,” she says, standing her ground, but only just. “I’m sorry for the boy. I’m sorry for Anna Beth Daniels and I’m sorry for the baby. I’m sorry that I called you here with some kind of blood sacrifice, as if I was summoning a demon, and I’m sorry that I still don’t fully know _why_ I’m even bothered by that. I’m a killer but you’re _Death_. What right could you possibly have to make me feel _bad_ about what I’ve done?”

Death doesn’t say a word, just fixes her eyes on Alpha’s as she leans down to kiss the chapped lips of the man Alpha smothered, the creep who doesn’t deserve such a gesture from one so beautiful, not even if its purpose is to escort his soul to the gates of hell.

“I’m sorry that I’m jealous and I don’t know what to do about it,” says Alpha. “Sorry for both myself and you. Sorry that I want you to kiss me.”

Death raises an ever-sculpted eyebrow at that, and Alpha treasures the little twitch of expression in Death’s otherwise perfectly schooled mask.

“No can do, darling,” she says. “Not on the lips. That’s a one time thing, and it’s not your time yet.”

Alpha looks at the hotel room around her, with its indeterminately coloured curtains and the stains on its carpet, the mattress that’s more springs than foam, the broken TV that shows nothing but the weather and infomercials. The dead body of the wannabe date rapist remains sprawled across the bed. A stack of dishes she hasn’t put out for room service to collect festers in the corner of the room. Part of her wonders whether she’s kept them there so that, when the cockroaches come, she’ll have company.

Before her stands the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and all she wants is for it to kill her.

“Is this some kind of punishment?” she asks.

Death smiles, a much softer one than the grin she usually offers Alpha.

“Nope,” she replies, but doesn’t give anything else away. They’re nose to nose before Alpha can really process it—human capabilities she can keep track of, but supernatural ones remain beyond her grasp. If Death were a human, her breath would be ghosting over Alpha’s face, warm and damp, but it’s only Alpha’s breathing that disturbs the air between them. 

A cool hand reaches up beneath the hem of Alpha’s t-shirt, sweeping over the skin of her stomach as if cataloguing its every pore, every scar and scab that mars it. Alpha catalogues the touch right back; the fingertips so smooth she wonders if they even have prints, the stiletto-sharp nails that, with the unfathomable strength that lies behind them, could easily slice right through her. The calm control that guides them in their soft scraping instead.

“You won’t see me again for a while, and you can’t come looking,” Death whispers into the skin of Alpha’s neck, right by the jugular, and by the time Alpha can focus on anything other than the soft lips that she still hasn’t felt against her own, Death is gone and she’s left to figure out how to make her solitary escape from yet another murder scene.

#

Ian Hennings. The name of the boy she shot was Ian Hennings. She sees his face on a news program that’s playing in a bar as she nurses one in a long line of self-indulgent cheap whiskeys. The reporter explains that his funeral was held earlier today, friends and family all in attendance, mourning the loss of a bright, friendly kid, very much beloved by all those who knew him. It’s what the news has said about every sweet golden-blond child victim that came before Ian, and what they’ll say about all the ones that follow, but there’s certainly no contending that children die with potential unfulfilled—whether that potential is for good or bad or another stunningly average TV-watching, beer-gutted existence.

She knows that news reporters wouldn’t say any of those things about her, if she washed up bloated on a river bank somewhere. She will be Jane Doe, missed by precisely no one.

#

The call for information on the murder of Ian Hennings grows more and more desperate and then finally dies away as the media lose interest. By now Alpha knows the face of Martha Hennings, Ian’s single mother, from every news station in the country.

It has to be pure chance that Martha joins the supermarket queue behind Alpha one afternoon. Hennings has pale, pale skin, so white it’s nearly blue, and dark bags under sad grey eyes. She has a bob of curly black hair that frizzes out around dainty little ears, and her lips are tinted with some kind of balm in a colour that reminds Alpha of the skin of a withering red apple.

And maybe it’s the endgame of a delusion she’s been suffering from for the past several months, or maybe it’s the final picture made by a handful of puzzle pieces she didn’t know she was collecting. The distinction doesn’t seem important anymore. She grabs her groceries back off the conveyor belt and methodically replaces the items on their respective shelves. She leaves things as close to the way they were before she laid hands on them as she can. Then she walks past Martha Hennings and out of the store without a word. When she arrives at the nearest police station, she begins to talk.

#

It’s a heart attack that does it, of all things. Christ. When Alpha was a young woman she pictured her own death so many times, and it was never so mundane. Shot, burned alive, stabbed, poisoned, strangled, smothered, drowned, beaten, starved, run over... she’d been prepared for every possible set of circumstances—except for dying old and grey and utterly without fanfare, here in a lumpy prison bed and a straightjacket that’s come to feel more like home than any place she lived before.

“So _this_ is your natural colour,” says Death—and it’s been years, decades, but Alpha’s memories of their conversations haven’t faded at all, not now that the tall, beautiful woman she knew back then is standing in front of her once more. Death’s hair is threaded through with dark steely grey, but for the most part she’s kept it black—just enough that she can taunt Alpha about her head of wavy grey and white, cut short and blunt years ago for practicality’s sake.

“Shut up, I was a brunette, you know.”

“Whatever you say, Allie. Personally, I like this silver fox look on you.”

Alpha laughs through the pain— _what pain,_ she asks herself as Death takes her face in her cool, wrinkled hands and presses their mouths together for the first time.


End file.
